The Four Roads

By Sheila Kaye-Smith

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Four Roads" by Sheila Kaye-Smith. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Sep 4, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547243649

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Sheila Kaye-Smith

The Four Roads

EAN 8596547243649

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

PART I: TOM

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PART II: JERRY

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PART III: THYRZA

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PART IV: IVY

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PART V: NELL

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PART VI: BABY

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PART VII: MR. SUMPTION

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PART I: TOM

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FOUR roads in Sussex mark out a patch of country that from the wooded, sea-viewing hills behind Dallington slips down over fields and ponds and spinneys to the marshes of Hailsham and Horse Eye. The North Road, slatting the heights with its pale, hard streak, runs from far Rye to further Lewes, a road of adventures and distances, passing Woods Corner and Three Cups Corner, Punnetts Town and Cade Street, till it joins the London Road at Cross-in-Hand. The South Road borders the marsh, sometimes dry on the shelving ground above it, sometimes soggy on the marsh level, or perhaps sheeted with the overflow of the Hurst Haven. It comes from Senlac and Hastings, and after skirting the flats, crosses the River Cuckmere, and runs tamely into Lewes, where all roads meet. The East Road is short and shaggy, running through many woods, from the North Road, which it joins at Woods Corner, to the throws at Boreham Street. Along this road is a string of farms—Cowlease, and Padgham, and Slivericks, mangy holdings for the most part, with copses running wild and fields of thistles, doors agape and walls atumble, and gable-ends stooping towards the ponds. The West Road is grass-grown, and in July St. John’s wort and rest-harrow straggle in the ruts and make the dust smell sickly-sweet. It forks from the North Road at Punnetts Town, and runs through Rushlake Green and the Foul Mile to Hailsham in the south.

In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr. Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street, in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine, like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece.

As he walked he muttered to himself, and from time to time cracked the joints of his fingers with a loud rapping sound. These two habits helped form the local opinion that he was queer, an opinion bolstered by more evidence than is usual in such cases. Women standing in their cottage doors noticed him twice halt and stoop—once to pick up a beetle which was laboriously crawling from ditch to ditch, another time to pick up a swede dropped from some farm-cart. He carefully put the beetle on the opposite bank—Near squashed you, my dear, I did. But He Who created the creeping things upon the earth has preserved you from the boot of man. The swede he dusted and crammed in his pocket. It was known throughout the hamlets—the Streets and Greens—of Dallington Parish that the minister was as poor as he was unblushing about his poverty.

The evening was very still. Eddies and swells of golden, watery light drifted over the hills round Dallington. In the north the sharp, wooded hill where Brightling stood was like a golden cone, and the kiln-shaped obelisk by Lobden’s House which marked the highest point of South-east Sussex was also burnished to rare metal. The scent of water, stagnant on fallen leaves, crept from the little woods where the primroses and windflowers smothered old stumps in their pale froth, or spattered with milky stars the young moss of the year. At Woods Corner the smoke of a turf fire was rising from the inn, and there was a smell of beer, too, as the minister passed the door, and turned down the East Road towards Slivericks. The fire and the beer both tempted him, for there was neither at the Horselunges, the tumble-down old cottage where he lodged in Sunday Street. But the former he looked on as an unmanly weakness, the latter as a snare of the devil, so he swung on, humming a metrical psalm.

About a hundred yards below Woods Corner, just where the road, washed stony by the rains, runs under the webbing of Slivericks oaks, he turned into a field, across which a footpath led a pale stripe towards Sunday Street. From the top of the field he could look down over the whole sweep of country within the Four Roads, to the marshes and the sea, or rather the saffron and purple mists where the marshes and the sea lay together in enchantment. The yellow light wavered up to him from the sunset, over the woods of Forges and Harebeating; there was a sob of wind from Stilliands Tower, and a gleam of half-hidden ponds in the spinneys by Puddledock. Mr. Sumption stood still and listened.

The air was full of sunset sounds—the lowing of cows came up with a mingled cuckoo’s cry, there was a tinkle of water behind him in the ditch, and the soft swish of wind in the trees and in the hedge, nodding ashes and sallows and oaks to and fro against the light-filled sky. On the wind was a mutter and pulse, a throb which seemed to be in it yet not of it, like the beating of a great heart, strangely remote from all the gleam and softness of spring sunset, pale fluttering cuckoo-flowers, and leaf-sweet pools of rain. A blackbird called from the copse by Cowlease Farm, and his song was as the voice of sunset and April and pooled rain ... still the great distant heart throbbed on, its dim beats pulsing on the wind, aching on the sunset, over the fields of peaceful England dropping asleep in April.

The Reverend Mr. Sumption cracked his fingers loudly once or twice:

You hear ’em pretty plain to-night ... the guns in France.

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He walked slowly on towards the stile, then stopped again and pulled a letter out of his pocket. It was a dirty letter, written on cheap note-paper with a smudged in indelible pencil.

Dear Father, it ran, "I reckon you’ll be wild when you get this. I have left the Fackory and have enlisted in the R. Sussex Regement. I could not stand that dirty tyke of Hubbard our forman any more. So I’ve gone, for I’m sick of this, and there’s no fear of my being fetched back, as I’m not satisfackory nor skilled in particular, and should have been fetched out anyhow all in good time, I reckon. So don’t go taking on about this, but please send me some fags, and I should like some chockolate, and get some of those kokernut buns at the shop with the crinkly paper round. It is a week since I did it, but I have been to the Y.M.C.A., and bought some Cherry-blossom boot-pollish and a packet of Players, and have no more money, and they said on a board ‘Write home to-night.’ Well, dear Father, I hope you will not take this too badly. Some good may come of it, for I am a soldier now and going to fight the Germans. Good-bye and don’t forget to send the things I said.

"Your loving son,

"

Jerry

.

(467572 Pvte. Sumption, 9th Co. 18th Bn. R. Suss. Rejiment.)

The minister crushed the letter back into the pocket already bulging with the swede. O Lord, he groaned, why doth it please Thee to afflict Thy servant again? I reckon I’ve stood a lot on account of that boy, and there seems no end to it. He’s the prodigal son that never comes home, he’s the lost sheep that never gets into the fold, and yet he’s my child and the woman from Ihornden’s.... His mutterings died down, for he heard footsteps behind him.

A young man was crossing the field from Slivericks, a sturdy, stocky fellow, about five-and-a-half feet high, with leggings and corduroy riding-breeches, and a black coat which was a little too small for him and as he drew near sent out an odour of moth-killer—evidently some young farmer, unaccountably Sundified on a week-day evening.

Hullo, Tom, said the minister.

Hullo, Mus’ Sumption.

The boy stood aside for the older man to cross the stile. His head hung a little over the unaccustomed stiffness of his collar, and his eyes seemed full of rather painful thought. Mr. Sumption fumbled in his pockets, drew out the letter, the swede, a pencil without a point, a Testament, a squashed mass of chickweed, a tract, and finally a broken-backed cigarette, which he handed to Tom.

Bad news, I reckon?

Tom nodded.

They woan’t let me off. I wur afeard they wouldn’t. You see, there’s faather and the boys left, and I couldn’t explain as how faather had bad habits. You can’t bite back lik that on your own kin.

No, you can’t, and Mr. Sumption carefully smoothed a dirty scrap of paper as he put it back in his pocket. By the way, my boy’s just joined up. I heard from him this morning. He’s in the Eighteenth Sussex—I shouldn’t wonder if you found yourselves together.

Lord, Mus’ Sumption! You doan’t tell me as he’s left the factory?

Reckon he has. Thought he’d like to fight for his King and country. He was always a plucked ’un, and he couldn’t bear to see the lads going to the front without him.

There was a gleam in the minister’s eyes, and he cracked his fingers loudly.

I’m proud of him—I’m proud of my boy. He’s done a fine thing, for of course he need never have gone. He’s been three years in munitions now, and him only twenty. He went up to Erith when he was a mere lad, no call for him to go, and now he’s joined up as a soldier when there was no call for him to go, neither.

Tom looked impressed.

Maybe I ought to be feeling lik he does, but truth to tell it maakes me heavy-hearted to be leaving the farm just now.

The Lord will provide.

I’m none so sure o’ that, wud faather and his habits, and the boys so young and wild, and the girls wud their hearts in other things, and mother, poor soul, so unsensible.

Well, what does the farm matter? Beware lest it become Naboth’s vineyard unto you. Is this a time to buy cattle and vineyards and olive-yards? This is the day which the Prophet said should burn like an oven, and the proud, even the wicked, be as stubble. What’s your wretched farm? Think of the farms round Ypers and Dixmood, think of the farms round Rheims and Arrass—Stop! and he seized Tom’s arm in his hard, restless fingers—Listen to those guns over in France. Perhaps every thud you hear means the end of a little farm.

Tom stood dejectedly beside him, the broken-backed cigarette, for which the minister had unfortunately been unable to provide a light, hanging drearily from his teeth. The soft mutter and thud pulsed on. The sun was slowly foundering behind the woods of Bird-in-Eye, sending up great shafts and spines of flowery light into the sky which was now green as a meadow after rain.

This war queers me, he said, and his voice, low and thick as it was, like any Sussex countryman’s, yet was enough to drown the beating of that alien heart. I doan’t understand it. I can’t git the hang od it nohow.

A lot of it queers me, said Mr. Sumption, and I reckon that in many ways we’re all as godless as the Hun. It’s not only the Germans that shall burn like stubble—it’s us. The oven’s prepared for us as well as for them.

They were walking together down steep fields, the ground dreamy with grey light, while before them, beyond the sea, burned the great oven of the sunset, full of horns of flame.

I’m thinking of the farm, continued Tom, his mind sticking to its first idea. I’m willing enough to go and fight for the farms in France and Belgium, but seems to me a Sussex farm’s worth two furrin’ ones. Worge aun’t a fine place, but it’s done well since I wur old enough to help faather—help him wud my head as well as my arms, I mean. Faather’s an unaccountable clever chap—you should just about hear him talk at the pub, and the books he’s read you’d never believe. But he’s got ways wot aun’t good for farming, and he needs somebody there to see as things doan’t slide when he can’t look after them himself.

Can’t your brother Harry do anything? He must be nearly sixteen.

Harry’s unaccountable wild-like. He’s more lik to git us into trouble than help us at all.

Maybe your father will pull-to a bit when you’re gone and he sees things depend on him.

Maybe he will, and maybe he woan’t. But you doan’t understand, Mus’ Sumption. You doan’t know wot it feels like to be took away from your work to help along a war as you didn’t ask for and don’t see the hang of. Maybe you’d think different of the war if you had to fight in it, but being a minister of religion you aun’t ever likely to have to join up. I’m ready to go and do my share in putting chaps into the oven, as you say, but it’s no use or sense your telling me as it doan’t matter about the farm, for matter it does, and I’m unaccountable vrothered wud it all.

He grunted, and spat out the fag. Mr. Sumption, taking offence at once, waved his arms like a black windmill.

Ho! I don’t understand, don’t I? with my only son just gone for a soldier. D’you think you care for your dirty farm more than I care for my Jerry. D’you think I wouldn’t rather a hundred times go myself than that he should go? O Lord, that this boy should mock me! You’ll be safe enough, young Tom. You’ve only the Germans to fear, but my lad has to fear his own countrymen too. The army was not made for gipsy-women’s sons. My poor Jerry! ... there in the ranks like a colt in harness. He’ll be sorry he’s done it to-morrow, and then they’ll kill him.... Oh, hold your tongue, Tom Beatup! Here we are in Sunday Street.

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Sunday Street was the lane that linked up Pont’s Green on the East Road with Bucksteep Manor at Four Throws. From the southern distance it looked like the street of a town, oddly flung across the hill—a streak of red houses, with the squat steeples of oasts, an illusion of shops and spires, crumbling on near approach into a few tumble-down cottages and the oasts of Egypt Farm. From the north you saw the chimneys first, high above the roofs like rabbits’ ears above their heads; then you tumbled suddenly upon the hamlet: the Bethel, the Horselunges, the shop, the inn whose sign was the Rifle Volunteer, the forge, the pond, the two farms—Worge and Egypt—with their cottages, and the farmstead of Little Worge sidling away towards Pont’s Green.

To-night it was fogged in the grey smoke of its own wood fires, with here and there on its windows the lemon green of the sky. It smelled faintly of wood-smoke, sweet mud and standing rain, of rot in lathes and tiles. The Horselunges, the cottage where the minister lodged, was the first house in the village after the forge. It stood opposite the Bethel, a brick, eighteenth-century building with big gaunt windows staring blindly over the fields to Puddledock. The Bethel had been built in Georgian days when the Particular Baptists flourished in greater numbers round Sunday Street, and a saint of theirs had built it to the glory of God and in memory of my dear wife Susannah Odlarne, saved by Grace. For Many are called but Few are chosen.

Mr. Sumption and Tom had walked the last of their way in silence. But the minister’s anger had fizzled out as quickly as it had kindled, and at the door of the forge he held out his hand very kindly to the boy.

Well, good-night to you, lad. I must look in and see Bourner here for a minute or two. I hope your mother won’t be much distressed at your news.

Reckon she will, but it can’t be helped.... Funny, you doan’t hear the guns down here.

No more you do, but they’re going it just the same—knocking away little farms.

Tom nodded with a wry smile and walked off. The minister turned into the forge.

Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from Galleybird or Harebeating, or even from the doors of sick people—if they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son.

His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof-parings and the ring of smitten iron. His sketchy education finished, he had taken his place beside his father at the anvil—he had held the meek tasselled hoofs of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment Day, he had swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent.

But during his adolescence strange things had grown with his bulk and girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching flames he came to see the presage of that day which should burn like an oven, the burning fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment a form of use. When the horse clumped out of the smithy with the new iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of God passed through fire into service.

He became queer. He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.

Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra Sumption, comely, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect, and emerged a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech. He was a great disappointment to his benefactor, for the smith in him had triumphantly survived all genteel training and theological examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness, his queerness remained as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity of his forge-born similes, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate and fume of the old Doomsday doctrines which were fast dying out of Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself.

In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood, where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her, as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both miserable for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They returned to the forge at Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual restless yearning of the Word within him, that drop of the divine which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.

At the close of the year Meridian Sumption died at the birth of her child. They had been ideally happy in their short married life, in spite of the cage-bars of circumstances and the drivings of the Word which divided them as in the beginning it had divided the waters from the earth. After her death he became queerer than ever. He roamed from village to village, preaching to farmers, gipsies, labourers, tinkers, all who would hear him and some who would not—leaving his child in his mother’s care.

Six years later the death of his father and mother made it necessary that he should take the boy—named grotesquely Jeremiah Meridian, as if to show his double origin in religion and vagabondage. At the same time his first patron, the minister of Bethersden, offered to recommend him for the pastorate of the Particular Baptist Chapel at Sunday Street near Dallington. His conscience had long grieved over the vagaries of his blacksmith saint, and in this empty pastorate he saw a way of settling both. Sumption had acquired a certain fame as a preacher among the ’dens of Kent, candidates for the Particular Ministry were not so many as they used to be, and the pastorate of Sunday Street, with its dwindling, bumpkin congregation, country loneliness, and small revenues, was hard to fill. After various difficulties, the new minister arrived with his black-eyed, swarthy child. He had grown tired of his wanderings, and had conceived an erratic, arbitrary affection for this pledge of gipsy love. He looked forward to a settled country life and to preaching the Word in his own Bethel.

The villagers, for the most part, liked him. His manners offended them, and as they were mostly Church-people they seldom came to his chapel except on wet Sundays, when it meant too much dirt and trouble to go to hear old Mr. Foxe at Dallington or young Mr. Poullett-Smith at Brownbread Street. But from the first he was as one of themselves, treated with no respect and much kindness. He was seldom invited to sick-beds or to officiate at funerals or marriages, but he never lacked an invitation to a Harvest Supper or Farmers’ Club Dinner. For his sake the neighbourhood tolerated the villainies of his Jerry, a throw-back to the poaching, roving, thieving Rossarmescroes. None the less, they were glad when at the outbreak of war he went to work in a munition factory, first in London, then, through a series of not very creditable wanderings, to Erith. Only the minister grieved, for he loved Jerry as he had loved no human thing since his mother died in the little apple-smelling room above the smithy. He was not always kind to the boy, and the arm which had wielded the hammer so lustily had on one or two shocking occasions nearly broken the bones he loved. But he had for his son a half-spiritual, half-animal affection, and the villagers pitied him when the boy went, though they were glad to see him go.

Mus’ Sumption wur more blacksmith nor he wur minister, they said when any local enthusiasm for him prevailed; and it was true that in his loneliness and anxiety he would often find comfort in the forge at Sunday Street, where he could sit and watch Bourner the smith swing his hammer, or even sometimes himself, with coat thrown off and shirt-sleeves rolled back over arms long and hairy as a gorilla’s, smite the hot iron or scrape the patient hoof, while his face grew red as copper in the firelight and the sweat ran over it and his shaggy chest.

To-night, when Jerry had wounded him afresh, he turned to his unfailing refuge. His pain was not the mere dread of death or maiming of the lad—it was something more sinister, more intangible. The army is not for the gipsy woman’s son. He feared for Jerry in that organised system of rank and order and command. He would have preferred him in the workshop even if the relative danger of the two places had been reversed. Jerry was less likely to be smashed by a German shell than by the system in which he had enrolled himself. He would break his head against its discipline, hang himself in its rules.... His dread for Jerry under martial law was the dread his Meridian’s ancestors would have felt for her under a roof. It was a fear based more on instinct than on reason, therefore all the more bruising to the instinctive passion of fatherhood. It was well that he had this refuge of iron and anvil, of hammer and hoof, this small comforting similitude of the day which should burn as an oven.... Bourner the smith did not talk to him much. He made a few technical remarks, and winked at his mate when Mr. Sumption boasted of Jerry’s valour in joining the army. But gradually the tired, careworn look on the minister’s face died away, his eyes ceased to smoulder and roll; in the thick stuffy atmosphere, strong with the smell of hoofs and the ammoniacal smell of hide and horses, grey with smoke and noisy with the roar of flames and the ring of iron, he was going back in peace to his father’s house, to the smithy at the throws by Bethersden, before the burdens of divine and human love had come down upon him.

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After his companion had left him, Tom Beatup walked quickly down the lane, past the Horselunges and the Rifle Volunteer, to where Worge gate hung crooked across Worge drive, paintless and smeared with dew. Here he stopped a minute, and looked at the huddle of the farm. It was one black shape against the yellow of the sky,